… and you have a remote power monitoring tool! Make magazine shows off the Tweet-A-Watt:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/02/tweetawatt_a_twittering_power_meter.html
Archive | 2009
Notes from CentraLUG, 2-Feb-2009: Open Source Business Models
By Ted Roche on February 4, 2009 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology, Web Development
Fourteen people attended the February meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group, a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group. We held our meeting at the usual place and time: the first Monday of the month at the New Hampshire Technical Institute Library, Room 146. Formal meeting starts at 7 PM. Gathering and networking often starts a half-hour earlier.
A few of us met at Panera Bread in Concord before the meeting for dinner and geek talk. We’ll try to make this a regular thing, if people want to.
Before the main meeting, maddog showed off a video he had created, inspired by some recent demonstrations of Open Source software he had seen. Using nothing buy Open Source software, including Inkscape and Kino. maddog emphasized that he’s not an experienced cinematographer, nor had he much experience with the other packages, but that making the video was simple and straight-forward. And the results quite amusing. Look forward to a future post with a link to the video!
We were fortunate to have a variety of attendees to discuss the topic of “Open Source Business Models.” After a brief introduction of what the LUG was about and where to learn more, I opened the floor to the attendees for discussions, and discuss they did!
We talked about the Brazilian music scene, Microsoft EULAs, the difference between Free Software and Open Source software, some great Open Source success stories, like the Project.Net software. There were questions on the fine points of licensing, comments on the openness of the Java Development Kit and runtimes, and much good discussion.
At the end of the evening, two lucky attendees got to pick from the assortment of books we’d been provided by generous publishers. Using the formula of:
(14*rand()).to_int
in interactive ruby and counting off around the room (I started with zero and we went clockwise around the room, a surprisingly difficult process with cats). Mark and Bill each won a book, congratulations! The next CentraLUG meeting will be the 2nd of March. Stay tuned for an announcement of details. Thanks all for attending and vigorously participating. Thanks to Bill for bringing the projector, though we didn’t need it.
Notes from Python SIG, 22-Jan-2009
The twenty-second of the month was the fourth Thursday, the usual night for the Python Special Interest Group to meet at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, New Hampshire. Thirteen attendees made it to the January meeting, making PySIG one of the more popular regional/topical meetings of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group.
As usual, coordinator Bill Sconce had a printed agenda with lots of news to go over. We had a round of introductions, though it was mostly a gathering of the regulars. We talked about Gotchas! — those little surprises that pop up while working through the day — and “reverse-gotchas!” — the ah-ha moments that bring enlightenment.
Kent Johnson presented his regular Kent’s Korner presentation on context managers and the ‘with’ statement. Kent’s notes for this and all past Kent’s Korners can be found on his web site. The with statement, along with decorators and generators (see how the KK sessions build upon each other!) can make a very powerful and very pythonic addition to writing Python code.
Arc Riley made the main presentation, on writing extensions in C. Arc was apparently one of the very first programmers to actually attempt to build an extension from scratch in Python 3.0, as he found that some of the key documentation was missing and some of the most important declaration about structures can only be found by reading the source code of Python itself. Arc documented his adventures for us, found a bug report to the Python folks, and provided the group with a very useful document of where the gotchas are, and some very useful bookmarks. The last link includes Arc’s notes as well as the C and Python code for the sample extension.
Thanks to Arc and Kent for great presentations, to Janet for the cookies and Ray for bringing the milk. Thanks, as always to Bill for running the meetings and to all for attending and participating!
Ideas worth repeating
“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”
President Barack Obama, 20 Jan 2009
“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.”
Benjamin Franklin, 1775
Notes from NH Ruby Group, 15-Jan-2009: Jonathan Linowes
Jonathan Linowes was kind enough to drive from “the other side of the Notch” all the way down to the seacoast to present to the New Hampshire Ruby Group on the 15th of January (note that the NH Ruby group has moved their regularly scheduled meetings to the third Thursday of the month). Fourteen members attended the meeting, which started with a round of introductions. Pizza, soda and T-shirts were provided courtesy of EngineYard — thanks!
A typical scene at a Linux user group meeting for the first ten minutes of a meeting to be consumed with the speaker struggling to get his X windows display to sync up with the projector. I’m beginning to suspect that the Ruby group equivalent is for the speaker to discover he’s packed the wrong DVI-mini-DVI-HDMI-Video-VGA adapter and no one else has the right video adaptor for his MacBook despite a half-dozen machines present. I wonder if Apple made a mistake by changing this adaptor in every model.
ReviewRamp is Jonathan’s project – a SaaS web site for a group to bring in documents, route them through their own defined process, and approve/disapprove/select documents. Jonathan offered examples such as business plan reviews, marketing plans and job applications. Designed to look as much like a desktop application as possible, ReviewRamp has a simple GUI, with templates and wizards to make it a couple of clicks to process. Under the hood, Jonathan talked about the architecture, which includes RESTful protocols, and a design intended to scale to thousands of projects, hundreds of submissions and a handful of reviewers per project. Unlike many JavaScript-only sites, RevewRamp works well with JavaScript disabled; sweetened with JavaScript enabled. ReviewRamp is publicly in beta. Jonathan presented some slides of the models: reviewers, projects, pages, subpages, fieldsets. This last was a segue into the 3rd presentation: fields are generated via metadata for each project, but the database tables don’t change for each project, so each project has virtual tables vis Jonathan’s DynamicTable design.
Next, Jonathan had a presentation on “Cucumber: How I Slice It” Jonathan had worked PHP and other languages before, was very attracted by Ruby as a new language and the philosophy of testing, testing and more testing. Unit-testing, test-driven-design, behaviour-driven-design. Jonathan also pointed us to Brandon Keepers presentation as an excellent starting point.
Jonathan showed us some of his Cucumber scripts, which include a lot of pretty cool extensions to the base, like {show me} to actually end a test by launching a browser so he could visually verify a result. It was apparent that Jonathan really took to the testing regime, adding extensions like “He” or “She” instead of always including “The current logged in user” or “the current project”
Should you use RSpec or Cucumber? Both, according to Jonathan: each has strengths and weaknesses. RSpec is more tuned to unit-test individual functions where Cucumber is more tuned to describing behavior and outcomes.
Check out
cap deploy:features
to run Cucumber on the deployed app (typically, you’d do this on a staging server, not a production server)
Shows some example Cucumber scripts. They describe in English the point of the test, and use keywords (“GIVEN” “WHEN” “{actorname}”), an action and an expected result. This is actually parsable Ruby code that defines fixtures and features and processes defined within the story runner. It’s not just a requirement, it’s actually the test as well!
Finally, running out of time, Jonathan jumped into his DynamicRecord presentation, where he had developed a method that was ActiveRecord compatible so that it could be integrated in the rest of a standard rails app, but actually queried against virtual tables that were created on the fly rather than actual tables on disk. Interesting stuff, and I’m looking forward to seeing this code pushed into OpenSource, Jonathan’s eventual goal.
Thanks to Jonathan for the great presentations, to Nick for running the presentation, to Tim for hosting the facilities and attempting to webcast the presentation, to Engine Yard for the pizza and T-shirts, and to all the members who made it to the meeting!
You can download the 3 presentations from the NHRuby site here: ReviewRamp, Cucumber, DynamicRecord, or view them online (Flash/JavaScript required) here.
GNHLUG in 2008, a retrospective by the numbers
I’ve added a link to the GNHLUG PastEvents page that provides a comma-separated file listing all the events from calendar year 2008. Some interesting highlights:
- Despite under-counting or -reporting of many events, we recorded attendance of 589 people, total, at GNHLUG events. This looks to be down a bit from last year, but I know I didn’t post as many numbers as last year. And it’s almost the same as 2006. Worth watching.
- The best attended event of the year (30) was the GNHLUG cookout. Thanks to Bruce Dawson and Carole Soule for hosting the event!
- Tied for second (at 22) were:
- MerriLUG’s Linux Digital Audio Workstation presentation by Christoph Doerbeck,
- DLSLUG’s presentation by Bill Stearns on FUSE, and
- Kent Johnson‘s Python 101 presentation at MerriLUG
- The bronze medal goes to Máirín Duffy’s Photographic Prowess (MerriLUG ,20)
- Honorable Mentions:
- Ben Scott’s Linux Server that Could (CentraLUG, 19),
- Arc Riley’s PySoy (PySIG, 17),
- James Fogg’s Administrator in a Box (DLSLUG, 17),
- Guy Pardoe’s Joomla 1.5 (MonadLUG, 16)
- And another tie: Richard Weait’s OpenStreetMap (MerriLUG, 15), Ed Lawson’s Scribus DTP (CentraLUG, 15) and my Cascading Style Sheets (DLSLUG, 15)
In terms of cumulative attendance, MerriLUG was on top as usual:
This is certainly a measuring issue, too: I record CentraLUG’s numbers every time, but many groups only infrequently post their numbers. Finally, by average attendance, a few numbers change, pointing out the many unreported ??? posted to the web page, and also reflected the varied numbers of times each group met:
- DLSLUG: 16.25
- MerriLUG: 14
- PySIG: 10
- SLUG: 7.67
- MonadLUG: 7.13
- CentraLUG: 6.92
- RubySIG: 5.33
If anyone would like to work with the data, you’ll find the CSV linked here (below the heading for each year, a link labeled “CSV format”) or linked directly off the bottom of individual year’s pages: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005. And if anyone is really into it, I’ve got an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet I’d be glad to share.